From Wu Xun to Lu Xun

This chapter focuses on Zhao Dan’s (1915–1980) career in film after 1949 to investigate a specific type of stardom unique to Mao Zedong’s China. It argues that this new stardom was similar to what conventionally defines stardom, but with an added political dimension: Zhao Dan’s acquisition of high political standing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This chapter challenges the paradigm of accommodation and resistance between the tyrannical state and subordinated artists, which presupposes a subjectivity or selfhood on the part of artists that pre-existed and was maintained against the intrusive hegemonic ideologies of the state. Instead, it underscores that the making of Zhao Dan’s subjectivity in the PRC—his subjectivity-in-stardom in this case—was a dynamic process, a “becoming.”